U.S. 'very happy' about Napolitano says Kerry

23/04/2013

'I'm enthusiastic' says Secretary of State

Brussels, April 23 - The United States is "very
happy" that Giorgio Napolitano has been re-elected Italian
president to usher in a new government after two months of
post-election stalemate, Secretary of State John Kerry said
Tuesday.
"We are very happy," Kerry told journalists about
Napolitano, the first president to be re-elected.
"I'm enthusiastic, he's an extraordinary leader," he said.
Napolitano is expected to grant a fresh government-formation
mandate late Friday after reading the riot act to parties during
his second inaugural address to parliament Monday, scolding them
for failing to form a government to pass much-needed reforms.
The 87-year-old Naples-born Napolitano became Italy's first
ex-Communist president when he was elected as the country's 11th
head of State in 2006.
At first his election was met with skepticism from the
centre right, but his measured, balanced style and incisive
action in periods of crisis earned him the respect of
politicians of all stripes, and increasing acclaim outside Italy
too.
He won international praise for the way he used his limited
powers to good effect to help give life to outgoing Premier
Mario Monti's emergency government of unelected technocrats in
November 2011 after Silvio Berlusconi was forced to resign as
prime minister because of the country's financial crisis.
Napolitano's early transatlantic ties were forged during his
years as the once-powerful Italian Communist Party's (PCI)
leading moderate, when he pushed an increasingly pro-US and
pro-European line.
In 1978 Napolitano became the first PCI representative to
receive a visa to the United States, where he toured the
country's most prestigious universities and won a sympathetic
hearing also by virtue of his excellent English.
He later became the shadow foreign minister of the PCI and
its post-communist heir the Left Democrat Party.
In 1943 his English was already good enough for him to act
as an interpreter when Allied forces entered Naples.